I have a lot of books. I read a lot of books. And yet some books I keep coming back to, time after time, until their bindings crack and they are candidates for replacement, or, oddly enough, the recycle bin. So I thought I’d go through my library and see what qualifies.

Right at the top are two history books, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) and Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970) by David Hackett Fischer. One could say Nazism is a historical fallacy, but the connection between these two books for me is a lot deeper than that. Shirer’s book was my introduction to a realistic political history, demonstrating how people, institutions, and customs interacted, often in unexpected ways, to create and destroy Hitler’s state. While Fischer’s book is a serious look at how historians, professional, classical, or amateur, go off the rails with what often sound like plausible arguments.

David Hackett Fischer

Both books are outdated now. I know Shirer got some things wrong, and Fischer often used examples from academic controversies of the 1960s to make his points. Yet I often wish more people read Fischer’s work, because I see his fallacies crop up in social media all the time. And Shirer’s lessons about how informal power structures shape history as much as the formal ones are worth remembering.

Turning to fiction, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) is the book I read when I’m depressed in the wee hours of the night and need some snappy dialogue and cheerful thoughts. While The Heritage of Hastur (1975) by Marion Zimmer Bradley impressed the hell out of me at the time, thanks to its exploration of both politics and sexuality in a science fiction setting. MZB’s reputation has taken a nosedive because of allegations of extensive sexual abuse by her and one of her husbands, which raises the difficult question of how much we separate the writer’s work from the writer. I respect the novel; I am disturbed thinking about what human costs contributed to it.

J. Frank Dobie

Finally, there are heirlooms. My father passed along some books to me over the years. The very first was a book about legends of buried treasure in the American Southwest, J. Frank Dobie’s Coronado’s Children (1930). Dobie told wonderful stories, and introduced me to a very different part of the world. I wanted to go off and dig for buried treasure! While The Literary Digest 1927 Atlas of the World and Gazetteer showed me that there were many strange places in the world, and that people of that time did not fully understand the history that was being made right before their eyes. There’s a lesson to keep one humble about one’s own place in history.

Again, both books are in different ways obsolete. (That does seem to be a common feature of non-fiction with historical dimensions.) While his liberal politics once cost him his position at the University of Texas, Dobie’s attitude toward Blacks and Hispanics as expressed in his book seems condescending now. And not only is the Atlas long out of date, but its parent publication, the Literary Digest, folded not long after famously predicting the wrong winner of the 1936 Presidential election. It turned out the Digest‘s polling technique was disastrously flawed, being seriously biased to the well-off, which is why it predicted a Republican victory. Instead, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt won his third term by taking every state except Maine and Vermont.

There are stupid ideas. And I had one. Why not review two genre-bending works of fiction, both by female British Commonwealth authors, both published in 1967? Won’t the comparisons be fun and informative? And so I sat down to read and review Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Anna Kavan’s Ice. My conclusion? They are both “books of wonder” (to borrow a term I used in a discussion over at SciFi & Scary), but you’re likely to throw one or the other of them across the room after you finish reading them.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is the more familiar, thanks to the 1975 Peter Weir film. Joan Lindsay (1896-1984) was an Australian woman who experimented in various forms before she wrote Hanging Rock. Judging from her Wikipedia entry, she sounds as if she’d have been amusing to know. The novel explored how the inexplicable disappearance of three girls and a schoolmistress on Valentine’s Day, 1900, and the subsequent equally mysterious reappearance of one of the girls, sets off a chain reaction of mostly disastrous consequences for the school they were attending, and the people associated with it. It’s heavily grounded in the Australian physical and social geography of the era.

Anna Kavan

Ice? You’ve heard of it or its author? You were ahead of me. Anna Kavan (1901-1968) was an English woman who became addicted to heroin in the 1920s and who radically changed her personality and writing style when she took the Kavan name from one of her fictional characters in 1939. She seems like the sort of person best described as “high maintenance.” Her novel, if that’s what it is, is about a nightmarish future in which the world is apparently being destroyed by wars while a new ice age is about to destroy all human life for good. The narrator spends most of the story pursuing “the girl,” a very blond, very fragile creature who has been socialized into being a perpetual victim. To the extent it’s grounded in anything real, the story traces its origins to a trip around the world Kavan took at the start of World War II. But in truth, it’s about a surrealistic world. It’s often held to be an allegory of Kavan’s heroin addiction, or a proto-feminist work about how women are degraded by society. Yes, you can read it those ways. And you’ll still be left with issues. It’s not a tidy work that way.

Despite the obvious differences, these two works have something in common. Both are “books of wonder,” engrossed with mysteries. Hanging Rock is about the missing girls: who they were, what happened to them, how they affected others. It’s a mystery set in an ordinary world, and scary for that reason. While the mystery in Ice is the entire surrealistic story. “The girl” is a mystery, the fate of the world is a mystery, the narrator is a mystery, whether any episode is real or a dream is a mystery. It’s about abnormal people in an abnormal world. The scary part? It resembles our own world far, far too often.

The movie version of Picnic at Hanging Rock, which came out in 1975, is so well known it is hard to read the novel without the movie in mind. But do try. Weir’s depiction of innocent teenage female eroticism is so powerful that it makes it hard to see the larger canvas the novel is covering. It’s about relationships of various sorts, many of which have dark edges, leading to the sometime classification of this as a gothic novel.

The cover illustration on the Penguin paperback conveys something of the mood of the book (Cover art: Hsiao-Ron Cheng)

About the nearest way I could think of how one might film Ice would be to model it on A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick’s 1977 novel that was adapted into a movie in 2006. That A Scanner Darkly is also about drug addiction is no coincidence. Ice would require layers of reality and unreality in visual terms to convey its nightmare-like qualities.

I’d say people who aren’t bothered by open-ended mysteries, or who like gothic novels, or who want an Australian novel, would all enjoy Picnic at Hanging Rock. While Ice requires a sophisticated taste for surrealism and a nonlinear subjective narrative shaped around what appears to be a violent sexual obsession and a dystopian future. I expect more people would enjoy Hanging Rock than Ice. In fact, I’m hard put to figure out who would enjoy both. Me? I like Hanging Rock, both the novel and the movie, for somewhat different reasons. I’m still trying to figure out my own reaction to Ice. It’s a hard book to categorize, to follow, to enjoy. To the extent I can sympathize with the narrator’s obsession with “the girl,” or understand the bleak view of humanity it offers, I can see depths in it. So I haven’t yet thrown it across the room. And probably won’t.

Daphne’s no longer going to be forced into an arranged marriage with some pathetic demigod. Her sister Agatha isn’t going to be forced to divorce her husband and marry her father. All’s right with the world, eh? Well, there is that problem of a death sentence the Council passed on Daphne’s head. And guess who’s responsible for carrying out that sentence? And how close she’s sitting to Daphne? It’s the end of Daphne’s adventure, one way or another, in “Verdicts and decisions,” chapter 22 of To Ride the Lightning Bolt.

And for me, it’s the end of a ride that mostly began and ended in October when I wrote almost all of this story at a fever pitch. Ever since then, it’s been rereading and revising while watching my readers react to the story. A bit more relaxing than the times I’m composing only a chapter ahead, I tell you!

As usual, the story writing part of this blog will go on hiatus for a month to give me time to recharge my batteries. And now that some personal issues in my life have been resolved, I’ve time to think of where to take this blog next. In the meantime, there will still be occasional posts. I know at least one book review that should come up next week.

Daphne expects the same favorable treatment meted out to Marie Antoinette before the Revolutionary Tribunal

All Daphne Vane originally wanted was not to have a marriage forced on her by the Council. But her marriage became tangled up with many other political issues of greater import to others, and she stands before the Council accused of violating its dearest values. Can Daphne succeed in bringing the Council over to her side? And even if she does, what political consequences will there be? Find out in “Daphne plays out her hand,” chapter 21 of To Ride the Lightning Bolt.

It’s the day of the Council meeting. The gods and goddesses will decide whether Daphne Vane and her sister Agatha will be forced into unwanted marriages. Daphne’s been fighting this since the beginning of our story; Agatha is still unaware of All-Father’s plans for her. Together with their unlikely ally, Vesta Fox, the head of the gods’ police force, can Daphne and her mother Cynthia prevent the marriages? Oh, and there’s this little problem that Daphne has killed a demigod . . .

Watch the fireworks fly in “The Council meeting,” chapter 20 of To Ride the Lightning Bolt, my weekly serial about a young woman with a marriage problem. And an ancestry problem. And a killing problem. And she’s short. But she’s not going to be a delicate little creature, not today!

Time’s almost up: the Council meets tomorrow, and Daphne Vane risks being forced into an unwanted marriage, as does her sister, unless Daphne can convince the Council that she’s of unsuitable birth. Trouble is that Daphne’s still very shaken by what’s happened to her the last few days. Finding out one is not entirely human and then killing a demigod will do that to some people.

Will the meeting between Daphne and Vesta go this far?(Source: Wellcome Collection)

Only one person has a greater stake in the Council’s meeting. Vesta Fox, the head of Enforcement, needs Daphne’s help if she is to prevent the strife that will be caused by All-Father’s plan to marry Agatha Vane from ripping the Council apart. And Vesta is a very determined woman. See just how determined in “Vesta Fox doesn’t need to use torture,” the ominously titled chapter 19 of To Ride the Lightning Bolt, my weekly serial about a young woman’s desperate attempt to avoid forced marriages for her sister and herself.

Daphne Vane has never confronted a man pointing a gun at her before now. Then again, she just found out she’s one-quarter hell cat, not something that happens every day, either. Those two unprecedented events have an unprecedented outcome for Daphne in “Darkness,” chapter 18 of To Ride the Lightning Bolt, my weekly serial about a young American woman whose life has taken a turn to the bizarre. If you’ve not been reading it before, you can start here.

It’s become a “thing” for some writers to suggest a playlist of songs the reader of their book might listen to as an accompaniment. Usually, the list is dominated by recent releases. Well, the song I’d pair with this chapter is one about emotional depression, a song originally released in 1969 by the Youngbloods, “Darkness, Darkness.” None of the many versions I’ve found exactly match how I think this song should be done, but the version that works best for me (so far) is the one done in 2003 by Lisa Torban, which oddly enough originated as part of the soundtrack for a documentary about the Titanic.

Detail of “Ophelia,” painted by Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais (1829 – 1896), modeled in 1852 by Elizabeth Siddel (1829 – 1862), who would also model for many paintings by her eventual husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.